


Dynamite

by th_esaurus



Series: A/B/Oh no [1]
Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017), Call Me by Your Name - André Aciman
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Attempted Sexual Assault, Gross, M/M, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-01
Updated: 2017-10-16
Packaged: 2019-01-07 16:11:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12236247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/th_esaurus/pseuds/th_esaurus
Summary: It could not go on like this all summer.





	1. Chapter 1

It occurred to me, around the middle of July and during the hallucinogenic haze of B.’s early afternoon siesta, that I had known right from the beginning that he was an alpha, and had deliberately put myself in harm’s way. It would have been blandly stated on his application form, perhaps hiding as an innocuous scrawl under his passport photo; I might have lazily lifted it, noted the information, and tossed the form on my father’s desk in a way both of us knew was a bad play at casual: _he seems interesting,_  I would have said.

I was not yet old enough that my heats were regular: in my sixteenth year I had come into season three times, much to the chagrin of my parents. Usually docile, an alpha past his prime and quite content with impotence as long as his wit functioned, my father had become openly protective, he and my mother flanking me through those long weeks when all my feet wanted to do was drift me towards the strongest _parfum_ in the town centre and make me drop my shorts for whomever I found. I spent much of that year sequestered in the house, improving at the piano, and having to wipe the stool clean of sweat and slick every time I had had enough.

My father would surely have preferred an omega assistant in the house the next summer. Someone who might mentor me in the convoluted ways of the world. But I forever seemed to seek out unconscious ways to rebel against the aggressive lenience of my upbringing: my parents were too relaxed.

And so it was Oliver who came to the house in June, and next to whom I lay now, wondering whether I had sensed merely from his grainy photograph, his haphazard handwriting, a faded scent from the side of his palm against the thin paper as he wrote, that we were meant to meet that fated summer.

*

His arrival kickstarted my miserable heat.

I was not immediately enamoured of him. His handshake was slapdash, though I had seen his firm grip around my father’s palm: clearly I was not worth the same attention. He wore collared shirts, which told me the skin on the back of his neck burnt easily, but he did not care to button them all the way up. His chest was hairy in a way I thought I found innately distasteful, but more likely it simply alarmed me; that glimpse of his skin was nothing like my own reflection when I had examined it coldly in the bathroom mirror, more than once. He was the epitome of a young man, a genus found rarely in my home: we entertained my father’s peers, my mother’s confidantes, friends my age, and sometimes hosted little parties for Vimini, though her own parents’ house was more than spacious enough. But Oliver was like one of my father’s statues, painted garish peach and sprung to life, tall, muscular, classical, and impossible to empathise with.

It horrifies me to think back on it now, but I have no clear recollection of his scent in those first few days. Much later, I accused him of smelling insidious, and he bristled at my joke. “You were the one who snuck up on me,” he said, sulking.

“How so?” I asked, kissing him as he pouted.

He carded his fingers through my damp hair. I sweated around him constantly, and had long since forgotten to be embarrassed about it.

“You smelled like someone else’s dinner,” he admitted. “I coveted you.”

But from him, in those early days, even to my ill-tuned senses? Nothing. He must have been so guarded. At the time, I thought him dulled.

And still, I wanted him to like me. It did not occur to me at the time that this was the same magnetic sway that pulled me towards strange men in heady ruts last summer. I thought I was simply a teenager, craving local popularity, desperate to impress. The blinding sun catching his white grin hid from me entirely that nature itself conspired against me.

We were both intelligent, in our own fields: my archival knowledge of composers and their work far eclipsed his, though he was better able to tell me the classical myths that inspired them. This seemed like a perfect intersection of our interests, and one I was prepared to exhaust in my desire to see him open up, to know whether his dull sheen was merely pretence or if in fact he was steely down to his bones. But he would not rise to my games. Curtly recommended me authors who could expound far more thoroughly on the legends I wanted to hear from his lips.

He kept his distance. It pricked me with melancholy. His first night in B. he had slept fitfully in the room next to mine - I was relegated as ever to the adjoining guest room - and I had heard him tossing with the discomfort that comes from a stranger’s bed. Every night since then, between dinner and the small morning hours, he absconded from the house with a carefree _Later!,_ preferring to spend his evenings in town rather than in my adolescent company.

I did needle from him, some weeks later, to my surprise, that he was a poker player, and had found refuge in a group of dry alpha and beta cardsharps in an alley off the southern end of the main promenade. Had I been such a danger to him that he felt forced to cycle a half dozen miles away from the house each night?

The thought, in time, would thrill me.

But for a while I slung baseless accusations at him in my mind. It seems cruel now, but the most reasonable answer I initially latched onto for his clear disdain was that he held some inherent prejudice against me. Boy omegas could never be described as commonplace - although time and changing social mores would reveal us to be less rare than popular science would initially admit - and Oliver had spent his whole life in America, a country far too young to have any pederastic history. I resigned myself to assuming he had been raised with that faint and unquestioned disgust at men of my disposition.

I resolved at once to dismiss his opinion of me, whether I had proof of it or not. For an afternoon I was buoyant, happy to read at my leisure across the pool from him, no need to resurrect some dead conversation from three days back in a desperate attempt to engage him.

Two hours later I was fiddling with the strings of my guitar, and he asked me whether I had ever transcribed any Liszt for it. I was obnoxious in my eagerness to show him I had. My fingers tripped over themselves.

So much for decorum!

Until this point I had waved off any guttural discomfort or fatigued overheating as a product of the abnormally humid summer. When I recalled this to my father after the fact, he chuckled: in fact the weather had been perfectly average, and it was only my body that felt so volcanic.

That night, I had flung my French windows open in an attempt to slake my body of that unbearable warmth. The breeze was not fresh, and felt more like breath upon my bare neck and back. I read for a while, until even turning the pages seemed to scorch my fingertips. Frustrated and ill-tempered, I threw my book down onto the hardwood floor and stretched out my arms and legs, all akimbo atop the bedsheets, scowling at the ceiling. I must have glanced at my watch on the bedside table: one twenty in the morning. Surely the air should have cooled by now? My nipples were piqued and I was all the more angry at my body for coaxing me into masturbating; how could it think of such things in this weather?

As the night progressed, my senses worsened. The sheets were an unreachable itch against my shoulder-blades; my old shorts, which had always before settled pleasantly against the curve of my groin, felt taut and poorly tailored; my hair seemed to thicken with damp sweat by the minute. Still my chest was flushed, and when, in irritation, I finally shoved my shorts down to my ankles and flung them aside, it did not take long for that panting breeze to coax me into hardness.

I pressed my fingers below my erection, and felt how wet I was. Even then all I could do was let out a growl of embarrassed chagrin. I would masturbate, I decided, but I would have to be quick about it.

It carried on like this throughout the night. In sleepy desperation, when I was on the cusp of coming a third time, I waded awkwardly to the bathroom along the hall, clutching my cock in my hand, and finished myself off directly into the sink so I would not have to bother with cleaning it up. I flushed the toilet nonetheless to cover my tracks; though I repeated this tactic on the fourth agonising orgasm and my mother, to my horror, asked over breakfast if I was having troubles with my stomach.

That same breakfast, my father asked Oliver as a simple aside, how he had slept. “Badly, Pro, I have to admit,” he said, slathering butter on his toast. He always took the seat furthest from me down the long table. “Got in around one, one thirty maybe. Hope I didn’t wake you--” this was loosely directed at me, and his lack of apology, even though he hadn’t, annoyed me, “--but I was restless all night.”

So we had been conjoined in our insomnia. I was pragmatic enough to dismiss it as coincidence at first, but something in the conspiratorial glance my parents exchanged over breakfast made me paranoid. What had Oliver been doing last night? The same as me, down the small print? Not only both of us awake, but both of us pleasuring ourselves, if such a fruitless act can be called pleasure? If he masturbated in my family home, in my bed, that was his own business, but I could not abide it affecting me.

It was my turn to enforce a distance between us.

I spent several days cycling back and forth from the town, meeting with friends, flirting with Marzia, a pretty beta girl I had known since childhood, and boldly ignoring Oliver. I was happy to do it. It gave me the illusion of self-control.

This was shattered in an instant, despite Oliver’s louche respect of my cold shoulder.

Marzia and I had gone to catch a movie one night. It was a Kurt Russell picture, though I don’t recall now which one; all summer flicks in the eighties were Kurt Russell pictures. Italian subtitles, an American import; I liked this turn of phrase and resolved to use it, wryly, on Oliver. I was grateful for the cool cinema, the soft, low seats, and for Marzia’s fingers, which were playing between my own, tracing up and down between the webbing and the nail. My palm was too sweaty for her to hold, and her gentle ministrations were making me hard, but I did not mind.

There were perhaps fifteen other people in the room, scattered all around us, and we were near the back. If she had decided to unzip my jeans and bring me off, we could have hidden it; I would have tried my hardest to stay quiet and not embarrass her. I wanted it. I felt like I had been wet with the heat for days; I wanted her dry palm on me as a counterpoint.

It took about fifteen minutes for me to notice it. The slight rustle a few rows in front of us, the subtle sounds of people shifting in discomfort; their faces turning to frown as though we were talking in a constant low buzz or rattling our popcorn boxes thoughtlessly. Marzia’s hand, on my thigh now, stopped where it was, feeling their gaze on us. Instead she leant her head on my shoulder. I was breathing through my mouth at this point. Had the air con broken down in the old converted theatre? My cheeks were flush enough to make the air around them pop and sizzle, it seemed.

Two people, a little way in front, after a brief, curt discussion, picked up their jackets and moved to the far right of the screen.

My ears began ringing.

Or was it the hum of the projector?

Marzia’s breath was getting unbearable against my collarbone.

And then a woman, perhaps five years or so younger than my mother, looking perfectly composed despite the miserable humidity, swept up the aisle and stalked down the row in front of us, leaning pointedly as she reached us. Marzia sat up, as if scolded, but it was me she looked down on with the brunt of her disdain, her eyes sweeping over me like I was offal in a butcher’s window.

She turned to Marzia. “Shouldn’t you have kept him home,” she said, with cutting derision, “in the state he’s in?”

Immediately, I realised. She had gutted me; a triple-bladed knife that one twists into the stomach, scoring and twisting the entrails. I was nauseous enough that I could have vomited on the faded carpet.

Marzia was unbothered by the stench, of course. She was a beta. She could not know.

The fact of it hit me, belatedly, as though I had swallowed a stone days ago and it had only now landed in the pit of my gut.

I was going into heat.

I abandoned Marzia right there in the cinema without so much as an apology. I had to go. I had to be at home, somewhere familiar, somewhere safe. I scrambled desperately with the chain on my bicycle, my hands too slippery with sweat; I dropped the little key once, twice, and flinched at the sound the metal made on the cobblestones. It felt like a rusted coin, scratching directly inside the canal of my ear. With the acknowledgement of my heat, the symptoms conflated tenfold: unexpected sounds were rocket launches, casual chatter felt like screaming, a fly meandering too close to my face sounded like a military drill.

I managed to free my bike, and wobbled a little way down the street before I found my stride. I could not remember the last time I cycled home so fast. The air whipped my hair around my temple and did absolutely nothing to cool me, merely slapped me about like a damp towel on my cheeks and neck.

I swore as I pedalled. As well, I was crying. Not even silently, and I was thankful to my old, distant God that he had seen fit to keep the roads between B. and my villa deserted. I sobbed all the way, and sobbed louder when I threw my bike onto the gravel and ran up the steps two at a time, barrelling into the front door so hard my shoulder throbbed for hours after.

I wanted my mother. She had comforted me through my first heat, at fifteen, soothing my hair as I lay in her lap weeping. I’d had to trail up stairs every few hours to masturbate, and then would wash my hands and come back to her judgeless embrace, weeping all over again.

Nobody was home. Even Mafalda was out at Anchise’s old hut, gossiping about who knows what, though she was a stubborn beta mare who had never had a drop of sympathy for my biological wailings. I cursed her, and cursed my parents, and cursed Marzia for her wily hands; I was hard again! Even at the merest thought of her fingers brushing the fly of my jeans! Looking back, it seems both strange and perfectly natural that I did not curse Oliver to hell along with the rest of my family. Why would I? I did not suspect him to be even tangential to this misery.

Of course, he was the direct cause.

I cursed him later, to his face, with laughter in my voice.

Still--

I cannot remember everything I did. I know I must have gone to the bathroom and thrust my head under the running tap to try and slake my burning cheeks. I carried ice in my hands and rubbed it on the bare soles of my feet, crying, and even that only chilled me for a second before the ice began to melt against my skin. In my mindlessness, I forgot that my room was Oliver’s room now, even if temporarily, and I flung myself inside it and down onto the bed, stripping immediately like a child in a tantrum; a button popped off my jeans in my struggle to get them off me as swiftly as I could.

The contact of my hand on my erection was too much, as though I had become allergic to my own skin. Instead I had to wrap the thinnest bedsheet around my palm and thrust up into that, desperate movements from the hip. I was going to come inordinately fast, and it was not going to satisfy me. I keened from the very knowledge, and as I did, I felt a viscous bubble of slick gather, and burst, and ooze out from inside of me, between my splayed legs, soaking at once into the mattress.

I came. It was no good.

I cried again, twisting the stained sheets around my hands and wrists and curling onto my side, pitying myself desperately.

Perhaps I had wept myself into fitful sleep. Or perhaps I simply lost track of how long I lay there, rent by my own unhappiness.

What I do know is that when I came to conscious thought again, Oliver was hovering in the doorway, tall and ill at ease and holding a dripping glass of water in one hand. It was the first time I had ever seen him hesitant, and I would look back in anger, unable to savour this sudden revelation of an emotion in him that was not dismissive or conceited.

I was a wreck. Naked and primal, burning red wherever I was able to flush: my cheeks, my neck, my calves, my ass even. I knew that I was still hard and shuddering all over, and that I was dribbling slick down the insides of my trembling thighs, but could not even summon the decency to cover myself.

To his credit, Oliver kept his eyes unfocused, or looked fiercely at the bedside table. “Here,” he said, offering me the water. He must have come home, so briefly carefree, perhaps ambling up the stairs for a mid-afternoon nap, and seen me passed out on his bed from my dehydrating tears, and fetched me a drink at once.

His kindness stung me. I had wanted to be the first to offer a gesture of diplomacy; to say, _here, we made poor impressions upon one another, let’s put it behind us and be friends._

To even think of such nonchalance now!

I gulped the water down so fast it spilt freely down my chin and chest, while Oliver sat at the end of the bed; keeping me far more than arm’s length away. And then, as I heaved in a breath through my nose and mouth once the glass was empty, I was slapped, all at once, with an earthy and frantic scent that I had never encountered in such fatal proximity. It was overwhelming. My eyes rolled into my head. I must have sounded like I was drowning, choking on the thick air, because Oliver jolted, reached out to see if I was alright--

Every inch he moved closer to me made it worse. It was almost visceral, tendrils of something physical worming into my throat and nostrils and swelling there until I could not breathe. Even my ears seemed full, drowsy with thickness, and his concern could have been shouted from miles away for all I could hear it.

I swayed dangerously, caught myself on the bed before he had a chance to catch me first. Put my hand up shakily as if to say politely: _give me a moment, please._ He was obedient, and did not move while I panted, clawing back breath.

“More water?” he asked, for something to say.

“No,” I gasped, clutching my throat, two fingers digging into my neck. I would die if he left my side now.

My gaze drifted in and out of focus, always on him. His kind, blushing face, the slight frown, the sheen of thin sweat on the bridge of his nose.

He was quite erect, in his unforgiving shorts.

And yet he sat still, waiting for my word.

(We spoke of it later. We spoke of it, in fact, while he was blissfully knotted inside of me. He had come, and I as well, and we were merely tied together now, easy and calm, his heavy leg resting on top of mine and his chest touching my chest. “I could have ravaged you, that first time,” he said, always a little embarrassed by his past fervour; absurd, for we had done so much to be shameful about since. “You don’t know how close I was. I wanted to cover your mouth so you couldn’t say no and just take you.”

“You should have,” I sighed, pleased.

“You would have hated me.”

“Only for a little while,” I assured him, and brought his hand to my mouth and suckled on his fingertips.)

After what seemed like fathoms, I was able to speak again. I asked for another drink, with ice and lemon if he could; and for clean towels. While he was fetching and carrying, I cleaned myself up as best I could on the dirty sheet, and balled it up in the corner of the room, then gingerly slid my aching body under the thicker blanket below. I was still feverish, and my hole and cock both echoed the frantic beat of my heart, pulsing uncomfortably. I wanted him in the room when I masturbated a second time, because the smell of him would bring me to completion fast once more, and I could not bear to spend more than thirty seconds with my hand agonisingly pumping my smarting cock.

I could not ask this of him, of course. Mere days ago I had been content to play piano for him. Now I wanted him a conspiratorial voyeur in my unprepared-for heat? I felt a fool, embarrassed at my behaviour. I would accept his kindness and summarily dismiss him, hoping that he would take up my bed next door and allow me to catch the drift of his scent from across the balcony.

But he lingered, on his return. “Mafalda will change the sheets before tonight,” I said, my voice reedy and feeble. “I forgot which room--”

“It’s fine,” he said, dismissive all of a sudden again. Then he backtracked, as though fighting his own defence mechanisms. “I’ll be close by. If you need anything.”

What a thing to offer. I needed his knot. Ha!

He made to leave. Then that beautiful moment of tender hesitance once more; and he turned, quickly, and crouched down all at once, by the side of the bed. He grabbed my face in his hands, and held me still, and pushed his nose against my neck, right against the glands, and he inhaled fiercely, deeply, intimately. I thought I felt the brush of his tongue against my skin, but perhaps it was just his wet breath. Under the blanket, my cock begged for him to stay; blurted a thin drizzle of seeping precome. If only he had slipped his hand down there and felt the proof of what he did to me; perhaps our less-than-merry dance might have come to its natural conclusion much sooner.

But instead he wrenched himself away from me, muttering an apology, slamming the door in his haste to go.

Half a minute of brutal ministration, and I came again immediately.

It could not go on like this all summer.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i actually forced myself to tone down how gross this was gonna get lololololol yikes

So everyone knew.

Two events occurred in quick succession that compounded my certainty.

The first was at tennis. By now I had realised my seasonal affliction, and kept myself covered in a loose cotton tee and shorts that brushed my knees; bulky socks and trainers instead of espadrilles. I felt and looked a fool, but I was trying ineptly to stop the osmosis of my delirious scent into the wider world: my friends were already hormonal, and more than once on a heady summer evening, Mafalda had shooed away pairs of rutting teenagers who had slipped back onto our tennis courts by dusk for an inept fumble. To my horror, she liked to report these incidents to my mother over breakfast, even as she deftly sliced open Oliver's soft eggs.

He seemed unbothered. "Let them have their fun," he said, looking to my father for approval.

"Youth is not everlasting," my father agreed. I could not scowl at them both, so my poor breakfast bore the brunt of my glower.

Instead of playing as I usually would, I sat at the fringes of the court, on the prickly grass, stewing in my unhappiness. A few of my alpha friends - and I had always argued to my mother that _friends_ was a stronger word than I cared to use - seemed distracted by my presence; the sharp turn of a head here and there, scenting me on the breeze. If I must be forced to suffer, I thought dourly, then so should they.

Oliver, who had only the day before pressed his nose and mouth to my skin and inhaled me like a heady toke, did not so much as glance my way. His forehand was tidy, but his backhand aggressively sloppy. He gripped the racket with both hands. "Like McEnroe," I said to Marzia, nudging her shoulder.

"Who?" she asked, not particularly caring.

Marzia was impatiently sweet, and kept me company until she bored of my self-pity. Her sister Chiara waved her over to join in for doubles, and Marzia went with little more than an apologetic shrug.

Chiara was bad at tennis and feigning to be worse, so that Oliver might come to her side of the net and take her wrist and press his crotch against the back of her tufted skirt and teach her how to swing. I could see her play and it flooded my mouth, made me want to spit. She did not even try to hide her deviousness, giggling with Marzia at Oliver’s gentle frustration to get a decent rally going.

I neglected to chastise myself for doing the same a few nights back, pretending to Oliver that I had never read a word of Heraclitus in my life - when of course, I had devoured his work as soon as I knew the theme of Oliver’s study - so that he would patronise me with a recital.

Chiara was, like me, an omega. How perfect she would be for Oliver. She would bear his children with a smug gaiety, acting surprised every time she touched her swollen belly, as though wondering, _my goodness! How did this get here?_ They might settle in B. for good, Chiara slipping into the role of the constantly-pregnant omega housewife, complaining with a wink about the size of her alpha’s knot, his insatiability, cooing over young omega girls and the earthy thrills they had yet to come; all the while Oliver would turn his nose up at me when he passed me in the street, while I held my empty belly and sobbed on the open brick walls in dark alleyways.

“You don’t want to play?”

I jerked out of my hysterical malaise. Oliver was crouching beside me, twirling his wooden racket deftly in his palm. His face was so near I could see his sunburnt lips, just starting to flake.

“I had better not.”

“Why?”

“Too tempting.”

“You?” he asked, far too surprised for my liking. _You, Elio? Tempting? What a joke!_

“Yes, me,” I snapped. Did he want me to list all the men who had ever brushed their hands against my bare arms in the street, as proof?

“Chiara is terrible,” he said, changing the subject at once. “Switch in for her?”

“I told you. I had better not.”

I think, in hindsight, he meant to be playful. He meant simply to shake me into action, to tussle with me as an older brother might to his shy sibling, to bring him out of his shell. But he got no further than putting his hand on my shoulder when his smile dropped abruptly.

I heard the clatter of a racket, and the fading bounce of an abandoned tennis ball, dropped onto the court and left to roll into the grass.

My skin under his palm erupted. For a frenzied moment, I thought he had branded me, his fingerprints tattooed into my skin, childish graffiti that signalled _Oliver was here,_ At once I was soaked all over in sweat, so much so that it dribbled down my shoulderblade from underneath his hand; and his smell, his _smell,_ the haze of it that overcame me like a billow of pot smoke lazily blown between two open mouths; I canted forward dangerously, almost falling into his chest, then reeled back as every scant inch between us seemed too much, not enough, never enough.

Everybody was staring at us. The current between his hand and my shoulder had rung out like a bell, calling all to prayer. The game had stopped. Had time stopped? My heart had, at least.

This all took perhaps half a second.

He pulled his hand back and I was aghast to see my sweat trailing down the soft underside of his middle finger.

“Best not, then,” he finally agreed, with a tight smile. The world revved slowly into gear and began to turn again.

I did not notice him wipe his hand.

(“I touched myself,” he told me, during one of our nightly confessionals. His knot was pleasantly reliable, granting us a good twenty minutes, headily entangled, to bask in what we had done and talk of what we had missed. “My hand was still damp from your sweat, and I touched myself with it.”

“When?” I asked, feigning scandal.

“You know when.”

He had jogged to the kitchen, between games, to fill a fresh jug of water. It was notable even at the time; he was handsome enough to never question that the fetching and carrying would be done for him. I could picture him clearly, shoving his fingers without fanfare down below his waistband, rubbing a line of my sweat down his cock, allowing himself the mildest of glottal groans before he came to his senses. Oliver, I came to realise, doled out his ecstasy in strict doses. His life was unflappably pleasurable, a seismograph that one could reliably glance over at and remark of the juddering report: _no change;_ but he allowed himself rare peaks and troughs, gluts of headiness and anger - both, I admit, of which I was often the cause - that sent the needle haywire.

“I thought your game seemed off,” I said coolly, though of course at the time I had been lost to my agony, my knees bundled to my chest in order to cage my erection. At once he began to tickle my ribs and chest until I was helpless. He loved to make me struggle while we were bound, to feel the tug of our knotted bodies as they begged for a little longer, if you please, just a little longer.

“I’m sorry,” I gasped, laughing, “No more, no more.”

He smoothed his hands over my ribcage with a satisfied hum, then kissed my neck, and then my mouth.

“--More,” I said.)

The second revelation, whereby I knew that not just my companions knew I was in a dreadful heat, but my parents too, came the morning after I slept with Marzia.

It was her offer. She didn’t like to see me suffer so, she said, and thought she might help. I might have told her charmlessly that I did not think a beta could be of much help to me at all, but she carried on saying, “Besides, you’re kind of handsome.”

She said it with a brutal ease, as though she might just be telling me what I wanted to hear, or wanted me to compliment her back in kind, or meant it genuinely but softened her enthusiasm so that it did not go to my head.

I had no tact when it came to praise. I hoarded it like a dragon.

So we made love on the beach, where we often strolled in the daytime. I was fascinated by her wetness: not a syrupy, gushing ooze like mine but merely damp along the inside of her cotton knickers. I licked her there, curious - of course I had tasted my own slick when I first came into heat, two years ago, and had immediately wept at my own brazen sickness. But hers made me smile. It smelled delicate. I kept my mouth and tongue down between her legs for a little while, and she rent her hands in my hair, her nails scratching my scalp.

It was mild on the beach, this late at night, but I could not cool down.

She took my belt and shorts off for me. We wriggled like worms in the sand, and as I shunted into her, I had a vivid image of Oliver doing the same to me.

Or rather, the gist was the same, the technicality, but none of the actuality of it: where my hips were stuttering and my cock slim, inept, he would be practised and thick, in that moment omniscient, teaching me everything I had ever dared to wonder about the nature of mankind, everything these past two summers had come so close to revealing, if only I had been braver or more stupid. Teach me how to take your knot, Oliver, how to be quiescent and sweet, how to lie with my legs splayed open around your waist as we bide our time until your seed infects the very bowels of me, lust and life intermingled.

I jerked my hips again inside Marzia, once, twice, and then I came.

It was a little better than masturbating. But only just a little.

The whole experience, headed off at the pass, did nothing to spark her cool ambivalence about me into anything more.

I slunk home, and touched myself twice more in the night. Perhaps by morning I could convince myself that these leavings, too, had been inside Marzia, and that I had confidently bedded her three times and left her sated and thrilled.

Ha!

The very least I could do was boast that we had done it over breakfast, to rankle Oliver and prove to my parents that I was not a child. I tried to act coy, wearing my sunglasses for breakfast on the veranda, even though it was not as bright as the morning before, pretending that I had drunk and was hungover on the cheap, sweet alcohol that teenagers imbibe, and on Marzia’s body. I was not explicit but danced around the conversation, drawing it towards Marzia and hopping away again before anyone could ask me what threshold we had crossed last night.

Mafalda, who was fussing at clearing the table, lingering in her obvious way to gobble up more my family’s lazy morning gossip, cut to the core of me. She could not prevent herself from clucking her tongue. “And what good will that do him, beta girl like that?” she tutted, reducing my presence at once from coy braggart to a ghostly interloper, not even worth direct address. “He needs a sturdy alpha girl, that’s what he needs, to set him right.”

My mother smacked her thigh gently, and my father frowned, which was as much as he ever showed displeasure, but it was Oliver’s reaction that flooded me with nausea. His back straightened, almost imperceptibly, and the faintest flush kissed him high on his cheekbones and the bridge of his nose; his posture he could correct at once, relaxing back into his chair as though he’d only needed to stretch, but the blush lingered around like a plain girl on a street corner, unwanted, to a point, and painfully obvious.

He was, I thought immediately, horrified by me. A jolt of disquiet he could not contain at such brazen discussion of my affliction.

And yet he looked beautiful. The burn of second-hand shame across his nose and cheeks, barely pinker than his tan but pink as an unripe cherry at the soft, clean skin under his eyes, where his sunglasses kept him pale. I wanted to put my tongue to his cheek and measure the temperature of his flush.

At this, my insides contracted. My ass, if it could, keened for him.

Even Marzia’s tenderest ministrations had not managed to affect me so suddenly; and this, just an idle thought!

I excused myself gracelessly. I could hear my mother chastising Mafalda as I fled indoors.

No use flinging myself in bed, though I needed the cool forgiveness of my pillow, my bedsheets. I was hard, and had to deal with it at once.

I veered into his room, frantic with need. I had to have something of his. The worst part of me considered rushing back outside and brandishing a steak knife at him, hacking off a lock of his hair and claiming it for a trophy; a glut of bile gathered in my stomach and threatened to surface. I smote such a thought at once, and focussed instead on my task, mussing at his desk and his papers, running my palm over his books, his few clothes strewn impolitely on the floor, so that if I could not find what I needed, at least I had his unconsciously-shed skin cells on my fingers.

There, under a crumpled shirt - his briefs. Were they clean? I snatched them up and brought them to my nose and mouth, inhaling.  

Worn, perhaps yesterday. I could not have asked for more.

Later (again, always, _later;_ was he so prescient to know that so much would occur between us, later? Or was it a simple coincidence brought on by the inadequacy of the English language?) he asked me, amused, if I really did it.

“Do you doubt that I did?” I scoffed. He knew me by then.

“No,” he shook his head, fond and incredulous. “But I like to hear you say it.”

So I would tell him exactly how I did it.

I hid his briefs under my armpit, even for the two-foot journey between our joined rooms. I was terrified that he, or my parents, or worst of all Mafalda, would seek me out like a radar and blare to the world what I was about to do, even when I myself had no clear plan.

Wearing them to rub myself off did not seem enough. It was too separate an action: his briefs would be a mere aid, and I wanted to absorb a part of him inside me. I thought, headily, perhaps I could bundle them into a tight approximation of a knot, work the fabric into my thudding hole, but this seemed impractical: this was a flimsy pair of briefs, not a hardened toy for easing my burden. Could I even work them inside of me, let alone keep them in, thrust them the way that I needed? And more than this, I was scared: to have the first thing inside me be so lifeless and dispassionate--no, I wanted him alive, his flesh, to feel the pump of his blood as it raced around his cock and echoed against the walls of my ass.

So what then?

I crept into my room, shoved a little pile of books by my closed door as a first warning if anyone tried to come in. Then I lept onto my bed, cocooning myself under the sheets, leaving only a gap for me to shove my clothes out as I stripped, and then, when I was naked, sealing that off as well so that all I could see was the cotton-filtered light of the summer mid-morning.

I put Oliver’s briefs to my nose again.

I felt like a sommelier, ascertaining the year, the region, the quality of a fine grappa.

And then, without planning and without quite comprehending what I was doing, I opened my mouth wide and shoved his used briefs as far in as I could take. I let my tongue and spit soak them, and then bit down, wringing out every drop, his and mine, and swallowed thickly. There. There, now I had some part of him inside me, something hotly intimate that scratched my throat with shame as it dribbled down into my belly.

I masturbated frantically. When I was close, I spat the briefs out of my mouth, leaving me dry and gaping, and pushed them down between my palm and my cock, and split into them with a sobbing cry, making sure to catch the full gush of my orgasm in the fabric that just yesterday had rubbed so casually against Oliver’s own heavy dick. It seemed like it would not end, a thick gush of semen spurting out of me in sloppy ribbons, on and on until it hurt me to hold on, and I was forced to roll desperately off the bed, onto the floor, and finish spending my desperate orgasm onto the old wooden floor.

Immediately I slipped my fingers into the mess. A deranged voice in me told me to consume it. To eat the evidence of what I had done.

I grabbed Oliver’s briefs to see if I could use them to clean up the spill. They were soaked through, useless and heavy with my semen. I scrabbled around the room naked, and grabbed a t-shirt of my own, wiping the floor frantically, even as my cock hung half-hard between my knelt body.

I wanted to cry. I wanted to come again. I wanted to burn his briefs, ritually, by moonlight, with sage, to cleanse myself of what I had done and to end all hope that our bodies might ever be so basely intermingled.

I sobbed out loud.

And then I froze, still kneeling on the floor.

I heard, or thought I heard, or wanted to think I heard, the creak of an old floorboard just outside my room. A heavy step, retreating. Had he been eavesdropping? Listening to me ruin myself?

If yes, why would he?

And if no, why not--?

If nothing else, it brought me to my senses.

I scuttled to the bathroom. Ran a full sink in which to soak his boxers, and a scorching shower for myself. I hoped the water would boil and flay the skin from my back, so I could no longer lay in bed and lazily abuse myself. Of course, it did not. I was free to carry on masturbating at my leisure.

I shimmied into his wet briefs, and wrapped a towel around my waist, meaning to secret them to the laundry before anyone noticed.

Only, when I opened the bathroom door, he was there.

Leaning against the balcony, like he might have been waiting a long time, or he might have just arrived, and was in the process of deciding whether or not to stay.

His briefs, between my legs, were dripping steadily onto the floor. He looked me in the eyes, ignoring it. Did he think it was me? My constant slick? I was mortified. I could not remember how it felt to be unashamed.

“Are you okay?” he asked, and his voice was gentle enough to hurt me.

“It’s just my heat,” I said, trying to sound like all of this was old hat.

“I know,” he nodded, swallowing.

I thought, for the briefest second: what harm could it do to ask him? To beg him to knot me? He was already disgusted by me. So all it would do was double his distaste and make him avoid me all the more. A blessing for us both.

“Do you have someone who can--?”

“No,” I snapped.

He looked uncomfortable for asking and fell into silence. There was only the steady drip of water on the floor. Was it just the briefs? Or was it me as well? My body wanted to melt for him and pool at his bare feet.

“Well,” he said, finally. “I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

It was the most kindness he had ever extended me. All at once I wondered how poorly I had judged him, and could not, with any degree of certainty, tell if I had been cruel to him.

“Oliver,” I murmured, and his name on my lips made me shudder. I knew that already; I had said it enough times as I worked myself into an orgasmic frenzy these past weeks. But it seemed to affect him too: his eyes closed slowly, as though replaying the instant of my whispering his name.

“This could be very bad for the both of us,” he said suddenly, in a low, contained voice, “If you don’t sort things out soon.”

“Oliver,” I said again.

I knew that I was wet now, I was sure of it.

“Please don’t,” he warned me.

But I was too far gone. Once more, I said his name, trying to be as gentle and kind as when he had asked me, moments ago, if I was all right.

Under his breath, he swore, the first time I had heard him curse. And then in a sudden about-face, he turned to me, took two long steps forward, and pressed his chest against my own wet, bare torso, and leaned down, and put his mouth against my mouth. It was barely a kiss. His fingertips brushed against the outside of my wrist as lightly as an autumnal breeze.

He may as well have assaulted me for all his slight caress wracked through my body.

“I’ll see you at midnight,” he muttered against my lips.

And then he turned tail and, with a single backwards glance that I could not begin to decipher, jogged down the stairs and was gone. As if nothing had passed between us.

*

Everyone knew. He knew.

He _knew._


	3. Chapter 3

****If he thought that his punishing deadline and my inclination to hysteria would send me into a spiralling melancholy all day - and in truth, I would have assumed the same - then we were both wrong.

His delicate kiss left me sweetly, blissfully high.

I replayed it like a well-loved videotape on our grainy cathode television. Already the experience had transmuted in my head, from a simple press of the lips, brief and ill-advised, to a swooning embrace: Oliver’s hands encircling my face, his mouth almost open, his eyes closed and his long lashes close enough to brush my skin. How had we angled our heads: to the left or the right? Had he breathed through his nose, or held his breath until we parted? How long had we kissed? Were we still kissing now?

I knew myself to be ridiculous, but the omega part of my brain had grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and was holding me hostage, pliant.

Oliver himself was conspicuously absent the whole day through; he had excused himself with Mafalda from both lunch and dinner, and taken his bike, and left. Absurdly, I barely minded. Why bother with Oliver himself, all his hesitance and obfuscation, his cold spells and hot flushes, when I had dreams and memories?

As calm as my mind was, my body would never be kowtowed. My thighs were wet with oozing slick all day through. It pooled in the backs of my knees and dribbled on down to my ankles. I spent half an hour floating in the pool, my arms outstretched, letting the sun make love to my chest and the water’s gentle current lick at my back, and when I was wrinkled and soaked like a sponge, clambering out of the water, I was forced to dredge the surface of the curdling slick that I had left in my wake.

I thought of Oliver’s soft kiss again, and could scarcely force myself to be ashamed.

(“If I had known how much that little thing sustained you,” Oliver told me later, dry, “I might have left it at that.” It was him, we agreed in retrospect, who needed sating. I wished he had come to me sooner.)

I did not masturbate all morning. I was saving myself for midnight. Midnight! I planned to come from midnight until dawn.

In my heady, kiss-sweetened state, I neglected to consider that I was a danger to myself. Lit dynamite in a still-seeming canyon.

The only villa within a mile of my family’s was Vimini’s - no threat there. In the early afternoon, I must have taken on the allure of crackling pork. My belly was full of Anchise’s latest catch, stuffed with dill, and Mafalda’s sugary mascarpone; my skin was reddened from the sun at its highest; my asshole and cock beginning to wonder where Oliver could be, what was taking him so long, what was taking midnight so long. I was breathing lazily through my mouth, my breath thick and buttery as the fish. I surely reeked.

My parents had retired for a nap in my father’s library, and I was dozing on my sheet music at the emptied garden table. My father, proud of his family and his wit, often opened the house to visitors in the height of summer, if they were polite and showed a passing interest in his work that he hoped to stoke into a gentle intellectual fascination. So the sight of two young men cycling up the gravel path towards our terrace was no cause for alarm. I was not surprised to see them, but they seemed to surprised to see each other. One - perhaps between Oliver’s age and mine - hopped off his bike and walked it the rest of the way, casting glances between his fellow tourist, the villa, and me. The other must have been closer to thirty, and his look was darker. He had an intent.

As they approached, I could smell everything about them. It was as though I had learnt a new language in the space of mere seconds. Both of them alphas, I knew exactly where they were in the cycle of their rut - the younger, just beginning, and the older at his peak. I knew how long, more or less, since they had knotted, and I knew whether it was with a beta or omega, a boy or a girl. I did not know their names, but I knew from a simple inhale, the secrets of their bodies, the churning of their blood.

I was on my feet at once. Not to flee; so much for fight or flight! I was erect, of course, and my traitorous legs were dragging me out to meet them on the path.

“ _Ciao_ ,” we all said, pleasantly; guarded. A long, discomfiting silence.

“It’s you, then?” The younger man asked at last.

I shrugged, as if to say: _is it?_

“Don’t play coy,” the other snapped. He had dismounted his bike by now, and his erection was heavy between his legs, under the slim cotton of his slacks. He was not well-endowed, but had the confidence of a man to whom it does not matter. My mouth flooded with spittle. “He’d be in the house if he didn’t want it, stinking like that.”

“I smelled you from miles away,” the younger man said distantly, embarrassed.

Could Oliver smell me? I wondered immediately. Or had he flung himself from the face of the country, the continent, the earth, to escape my unconscious taunt?

I shrugged again. _Not my problem_.

All three of us were touching ourselves, casually. My hand had slipped below my waistband, even. I could not bring myself to chastise it.

“Who’d you want?”

I sniffed. “Neither.”

The older man took a step towards me, and unzipped his slacks. It was true: his cock was not long, but thick and heavy. I could almost hear the rubbery squelch it would make if he were to work it into my viscous hole.

“Who do you want?” he asked again, and grabbed for me through my shorts. I darted back, but only a step; still my body would not relent. Why wait until midnight when the offer was here, twice over? It was all I had craved, all summer.

In a rush, he grabbed for me, got me into a violent headlock. I had never had siblings with which to wrassle and roughhouse as a child, and had never learnt to defend myself, so he hooked me as easily as a trout, his thick arm looping under my chin and holding me steady. He pressed his nose deep into the back of my neck and inhaled; kissed me wetly; kicked my legs apart with his foot as though I were as weak as a struggling fawn.

Looking back, it is bizarre to me that I was not scared. Merely annoyed, like someone was about to pluck, without asking, the last macerated strawberry from a bowl I had been savouring all day.

The younger man, skittish, had scrambled onto his bike and fled.

I felt his heavy cock press against my asscheek, a little left of its goal. And then the roaming nose, probing the skin at the top of my spine, hit a point on my shoulder and stopped, all at once. He jerked back as though he had smelled something vile, pushed me bodily away from him. Angrily, he tucked his doused cock back into his slacks, clearly pissy at his erection.

“Should’ve said you were claimed,” he grunted.

At that single word, I felt as though I had been slapped. Not a playful tap on my cheek, but a full-bodied sting, reverberating on my near-burnt skin.

He had smelled that slight patch of skin where, only the other day, Oliver had placed his hand on me at tennis.

I lowered myself to the ground so that I would not fall. Laid my body shivering against the gravel, each pebble digging into my sensitive skin like a glass shard; frantically, as though my mind was rebelling against considering the obvious implication, I recalled a lecture my father had given me once about how the simplest, plainest rock has the capacity to become a stained glass window, under the right conditions. I watched the stranger’s bike cycle away, tilted sideways, at considerable speed.

And then I shut my eyes, and sobbed with yearning, for the first time that day, for my Oliver; my Oliver; for Oliver.

*

That predictable malaise overcame me for the rest of the afternoon. I thought about telephoning Marzia, to beg for her company and her cunt, but I guessed she was cool on me since my inept pawing. I traipsed around the house, my bare feet slapping on the floorboards. I quaffed long, sweating glasses of Mafalda’s apricot juice, and neglected to thank her. I lay my head on my mother’s lap and nudged her to stroke my hair: I said nothing of the day’s events, but wanted her to know that I was sad.

“Where has your _muvi star_ got to, hmm?” she murmured, tilting her face above mine to catch my eye. I had no answer for her, and turned around petulantly, burying my face in the creases of her skirt. It did not register with me, at the time, that she called Oliver _mine._

My parents had a dinner planned with out-of-town friends, which no amount of childish whining would permit me absence from. I bathed, scrubbed, doused myself in cologne, greeted our guests, smiled, played piano, ate dinner, made chit-chat. But my mind was elsewhere. My mind was on midnight.

What could happen at midnight?

My most likely bet was that it would be brisk and rough. A brutal exorcising of a necessary lust, where Oliver’s ejaculate would be little more than an exclamation mark: _There! It’s done!_ Then he could go back to ignoring me, claim or no. It had been an accident of nature.

I lost myself briefly over after-dinner espresso to a depressive fantasy about Oliver’s return to America. He would live an unaffected life but I, a widowed omega at only seventeen, would go on stunted, if I could go on at all. No self-respecting alpha would come near me, and I would be reduced to frantic trysts with undiscerning betas to try and sate my yearly heats. Sex for leisure would be unthinkable. I would be a life-long leper.

“Elio?” My mother’s gentle voice jerked me back to reality. “Fetch your guitar? The evening is so warm, let’s stay out here.”

My second expectation was that nothing whatsoever would happen, come midnight. Oliver would sit me on the opposite side of the room and tell me sternly that I was an unwarranted temptation, a danger to both him and myself, and that he would have none of it; especially from a _boy_. He was here to work on his paper, his suntan, and his technique with the girls; I was to keep out of his way.

There was a third path I had barely allowed myself to consider: that, at midnight, I would go into his room, and we would make love all the night through; his legs tangled in mine, my hands in his hair, his kisses both soft and all-consuming, and his cock deep enough inside me that it would seem to graze my belly.

My fingers faltered over Mozart’s _Variations on a Theme._

“Elio,” my mother murmured.

“I’m exhausted,” I said, apologetic.

“Then to bed with you,” my father announced. I glanced at my watch. It was barely past ten. I had not planned to be alone with my thoughts until scant minutes to midnight, terrified of my own impatience. Still, an escape route had been offered to me and I could not refuse it. Feigning a great yawn, I kissed my mother and father goodnight, bade farewell to our guests, and slumped unhappily up to my room.

Oliver was just as absent as he had been all day. I flung open my bedroom window and leant out onto the dark balcony, inhaling as hard as I could through my mouth and nose, filling my lungs with the warm night air, in and out, again and again; but I could scent nothing of him. Not an iota.

I hated how much I could not bring myself to hate him.

*

I must have cried myself to sleep. I felt groggy when I awoke, cotton-headed, but also calmer than I had in days. My thoughts were soupy and ill-formed. I grasped out for my watch, but couldn’t quite remember why I needed to know the time so urgently.

It was four minutes to midnight.

And then his scent hit me through the open windows. It was not the same feverish assault as I had borne earlier in the summer. It felt sweeter, like the giddy perfume of an alcoholic punch: overripe fruit, sugar, and something addictive. I scrambled out of bed, still in my evening clothes, tugging them off even as I half-crawled to the balcony that joined our rooms. I needed to be naked. My thoughts were still indecipherable to me, but my body, its nature, millennia of evolution linking me back to my most primitive ancestors; my body knew what to do, and took my hand, and gently guided me out onto the balcony, to where Oliver was shakily smoking a cigarette.

I must have looked feral, my hair askew, my chest heaving, my mouth open, and naked to the night air. This was it, then.

He glanced at me and then away, his eyes shut tight. He could not even bear to look at me.

“Please,” I said, though I hated to beg. My shame had all been used up by my seeping slick at every innocuous dinner beside him, my hourly erections and frenetic masturbation, my keening muscles that clenched and flexed to try and grasp for him, even from feet away. “Please, do it.” I wanted to take his hand and put it on my cock. Out of my heat I would never be so bold, but he was here, and so was I. “Then it will be done and you’ll never have to look at me again.”

He flung his sharp gaze at me. “Why do you say it like that?”

“I know you despise me.”

“Elio,” he said angrily, and he stubbed his cigarette out on the metal railings, brushed away the ash. “Elio, I worship you.”

I think he caught me as I fell.

My knees simply went out. The sudden recalibration of the world swept my feet from under me; like deciphering an Escher sketch, all at once seeing quite clearly where each staircase leads, I realised that it was not through loathing that he avoided me. It was fear. An utter, catastrophic fear that I could upend his whole way of life. His tightly scheduled plans, perhaps set for him by a father I would never meet: to find a pleasant girl, to mate, to marry, to breed, to age, to retire, to die. And here was I standing like a fortress erected overnight, directly in his path, no way around it.

His hands felt huge on my waist and shoulder. He kept them as still as he could.

“Now that I’ve touched you, I won’t be able to stop,” Oliver said quietly. It was the most honest he had ever been with me.

“Kiss me again,” I asked, feather light, and he groaned as though he had forgotten he had ever kissed me at all.

And then: yes. He kissed me again. Just as I had imagined it.

When he slipped his tongue past my lips and into my mouth, it felt like he had come home to me.

He must have carried me into his room, because he did not take his hands off me. Kissed me and kissed me and laid me on his bed, which was also my bed, our bed, and kissed me again. I reached for his belt and he made the slightest noise of protest: it was the point of no return, a literal unlocking of his lust which neither of us would be able to contain. But I needed to see it. I needed it in my hand, my mouth, inside of me.

My hands were sweating so badly I could barely grasp his buckle. He had to bat me away and do it for me. But I was the one who slipped his briefs down and bared his swollen cock to the night air.

He seemed shy, embarrassed. It crossed my mind to wonder if he had ever been with an omega, with someone for whom his cock is the very centre of their existence; or only with politely indifferent betas, who can give or take, neither here nor there. It crossed my mind to wonder, but then the absolute need to have him inside me erased every other impetus.

I took his cock in my mouth at once. Heavy and hard against my tongue. He grabbed at my hair, two hands, hissing.

I was in heaven. I had never known anything like it. I felt a terrible keening agony for everyone born in this world who was not an omega. How complicated I had made everything! How stupid to dance back and forth for weeks on end when I should have pinned him to the floor the first day he arrived, sucked him hard, and ridden him until he filled me to the brim. I could have had that every day this miserable summer.

I gasped as I pulled back, a thick thread of spittle and precome spooling out between my tongue and his cockhead. “Fuck me,” was all I could say.

His hands tightened in my hair. “I don’t want to claim you,” he said. I don’t think he meant to hurt me, I truly don’t. He was so scared.

“You already have,” I breathed.

“I know,” he said, abjectly miserable. He squeezed his eyes shut as if by doing so he could hold the flood of his lust back. Carefully, I leant forward and kissed the slip of skin between the bottom of his t-shirt, and his open shorts. I wanted to be the raindrop that broke his dam.

And then Oliver let himself go.

He bit the soft meat of my neck. Just behind the clavicle. Not sharp enough to draw blood, but I would bruise two days after, blotchy yellow and black. I wanted it. I wanted whatever he wanted to do to me. If he wanted me to fight, I would scrape my nails down his back. If he wanted me pliant, I would slacken all my limbs and let him manhandle me like a marionette. If he wanted me to give back like for like, I would press my mouth to every place he put his.

“Tell me,” I breathed.

“On the bed,” he managed, half pushing me up onto the mattress.

I had seen an omega girl presenting once, in the street, when I was perhaps thirteen. Completely unable to help herself, as though commanded by God. She had bunched up her skirt and pressed her cheek into the redbrick wall of the nearest villa, her legs spread, her feet canting inwards, her cunt as upturned as she could push it. I thought I had seen her alpha press his fingers there for a moment before he huddled her back into chastity. My mother, whom I was with at the time, clucked her tongue fondly, as though she remembered such wanton desperation. I could not empathise. I thought it crude. I would never debase myself like that, I decided; I would be contrary and bashful, moral and without lust.

Easy to decide such things before one’s first heat rips through all sanity.

All I could do once I was on the bed was offer myself to him. I spread my arms out in front of me and buried my face in the cotton sheets, taking a mouthful so I would miss his cock less; my knees slumped to each side but my ass, oh, my ass stood to military attention. Here, Oliver, here, take it, a gift, unwrapped, untouched even, except by my own shaking fingers, in dark and secret places--

Without warning, he thrust two fingers into my soused asshole.

I came almost immediately. What else could I do? I was born for this. Why had I ever wanted to fight the truth of it?

“Wait--” he said, pulling out just as roughly as he had forced his way in.

“No--” I gasped, turning over and grabbing for his hand. It was mine and I wanted it. I put his fingers to my mouth and sucked myself off of him and did not care. I could not care. “No, it’s only the first--Please, Oliver--”

I think he ripped the seam of his t-shirt in his haste to get it off. We needed our skin upon each other. I could not count, looking back, how many times I thought I would die that night if he didn’t touch me at once. I wanted him to put his finger on each and every nerve in my body, one at a time; to unravel my guts and run his hands along the length of them, and then curl them back into my stomach, dirty with the sweat on his palms.

“I wish you could put your knot in me,” Oliver told me.

His brutal admission stuck me like a pig. I had never heard of an alpha uttering such a thing. I longed for it immediately, and knew it was impossible, but struggled to find the closest approximation I could: “Call me by your name,” I gasped.

He understood me. “And I’ll call you by mine,” he nodded.

My body did not argue with him at all. It eased his thick cock inside of me like a fireside welcomes a weary traveller. We spoke each other’s names until they were the same name, kissed until his breath and my breath were all the air was made of, fucked until we could not tell if we would ever stop or if, in fact, we had ever started, or if we had been making love since time began and the world was twisted and bare. He could fuck me for the rest of my life, without end, and I could be happy with that.

“Oliver,” he sobbed, and I did not know if it was his name or mine.

*

He came three or four times while he was knotted inside of me. We were spooned, chest to back, and I liked the helpless little thrusts he meted out when he could do nothing but spill more of his seed into my waiting body. I felt flooded, limp and wet, and he clung to me with a softness I had not guessed he had in him.

“This is what it’s like, then,” I murmured.

He was still shuddering through another orgasm, and had to catch his breath before he nudged at the back of my neck with his nose, questioning.

“To be claimed,” I said, simply. I was happier than I had ever been in my life.

He did not answer. He did not answer, but pressed a quiet kiss at the top of my spine.

*

We made helpless love all through the rest of the summer.

In two days, we shall go to Rome, and make love there as well.

And in three days after that, Oliver?

\--Oliver?


End file.
